"Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

it peered again into the vision it had created, trying to learn what rules of
mind and physiology connected the scintillating images with the girl's
reaction.
"They aren't really slow," Rathere murmured. "The world is just so fast..."
Isaah, Rathere's father, looked out upon the statues of Petraveil.
Their giant forms crowded the town square. They dotted the high volcanic
mountain overlooking the city. They bathed in the rivers that surged across
the black equatorial plains, staining the waters downstream with rusted metal
colors.
The first time he had come here, years before, Isaah had noticed that in the
short and sudden afternoon rains, the tears shed from their eyes carried a
black grime that sparkled with colored whorls when the sun returned.
They were, it had been determined a few decades before, very much alive.
Humanity had carefully studied the fantastically slow creatures since
discovering their glacial, purposeful, perhaps even intelligent animation.
Mounted next to each lithomorph was a plaque that played a time-series of the
last forty years: a dozen steps, a turn of the head as another of its kind
passed, a few words in their geologically deliberate gestural language.
Most of the creatures' bodies were hidden underground, their secrets teased
out with deep radar and gravitic density imaging. The visible portion was a
kind of eye-stalk, cutting the surface like the dorsal fin of a dolphin
breaking into the air.
Isaah was here to steal their stories. He was a scoop.
"How long until we leave here?" Rathere asked.
"That's for your father to decide," the AI answered.
"But when will he decide?"
"When the right scoop comes."
"When will that come?"
This sort of mildly recursive loop had once frustrated the AI's conversational
packages. Rathere's speech patterns were those of a child younger than her
years, the result of traveling among obscure, Outward worlds with only her
taciturn father and the AI for company. Rathere never formulated what she
wanted to know succinctly, she reeled off questions from every direction,
attacking an issue like a host of small predators taking down a larger animal.
Her AI companion could only fend her off with answers until (often
unexpectedly) Rathere was satisfied.
"When there is a good story here, your father will decide to go."
"Like what story?"
"He doesn't know yet."
She nodded her head. From her galvanic skin response, her pupils, the gradual
slowing of her heart, the AI saw that it had satisfied her. But still another
question came.
"Why didn't you just say so?"
In the Expansion, information traveled no faster than transportation, and
scoops like Isaah enriched themselves by being first with news. The standard
transmission network employed small, fast drone craft that moved among the
stars on a fixed schedule. The drones promulgated news throughout the
Expansion with a predictable and neutral efficiency, gathering information to
centralized nodes, dispersing it by timetable. Scoops like Isaah, on the other
hand, were inefficient, unpredictable, and, most importantly, unfair. They cut